The Trouble With Hairy, page 8
part #2 of West Hollywood Vampires Series
One of the deputies who had been first on the scene had turned an odd shade of green; the other wasn’t looking too perky herself. Clive felt his own stomach churn at the devastation that had been Jeremy Lucas. The head had been smashed almost beyond recognition and great gaping wounds could be seen on the young man’s arms and along his sides and across his chest. Clive could see bits of bone and gristle peeping out through the lacerated flesh.
It looked like the body had not only been dragged beneath the wheels of the truck, but also smashed between the back end of the truck and the wall of the garage when the vehicle did a 180. The corpse was so badly mangled Clive would have been willing to swear there were parts of it missing. He turned away, searching for an excuse to avoid looking at the wreckage that had so recently been a human being.
“Has anyone called the coroner?” he asked the deputy.
“I couldn’t reach her,” she replied wretchedly. “Her machine wasn’t on. I tried the cell phone but it’s been turned off again. She must have broken hers again.”
“She doesn’t actually break them,” Clive replied absently while he tried to form an overall mental impression of the accident scene. “She just sort of gums them up.”
She’s probably sleeping, Clive thought, and decided against going over to her apartment and disturbing her. Tomorrow would be soon enough for the autopsy. Yet something, some indefinable thing about what at first looked to be a suicide, was indescribably…off. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but so far, his gut instincts had never been wrong.
“See if you can get Ty over here. After the crime boys are finished, have him bag it and take it over to the morgue. Don’t bother Becky. She’ll have enough to do tomorrow.”
The deputy rushed off to the patrol car, eager to comply with anything that would get her away from the rapidly cooling corpse.
A group of neighbors stood behind the makeshift police barrier, craning their necks to indulge their morbid curiosity and hoping to get a good glimpse of the body. Clive approached them, trying very hard not to shake his head in disgust.
“Did anybody see him jump?” he asked. There was a chorus of negative responses until one man with sequined eyelashes wearing a yellow flowered lady’s housecoat pushed his way to the front of the crowd.
“No way he jumped,” piped the sunflower-studded vision of loveliness.
“Who are you?” Clive asked, taking out his notebook.
“Brooke Tucker. I own the building.” He put his hand to his forehead in a theatrical gesture of pride and blushed, realizing that he still had curlers in his hair.
“Well, Mr. Tucker, did you happen to recognize the deceased?”
“Damn straight I do!” replied Tucker in a full, rich baritone as he started to remove the curlers quickly, trying not to tear out his hair in the process. “And that’s Ms. Tucker to you!” He removed the last of the curlers, shoving them into his housecoat pocket, and preened as most of the rest of the crowd hooted with mostly, though not exclusively, good nature.
“I’m more man than you are and more woman than you’ll ever hope to be!” he quoted to a large bathrobe-wrapped woman whose laughter had been particularly derisive.
“That may be, Ms. Tucker,” said Clive diplomatically. “But now, ah, as to the deceased’s identity?”
“That’s Jeremy Lucas. Unit 704,” Tucker announced.
“Are you certain?” asked Clive. “It’s not very easy to tell.”
“I don’t make mistakes like that!” snapped Tucker. “Of course it’s Jeremy. I live in 101. I heard him yelling in the lobby.”
“Yelling in the lobby?” Clive’s instincts were aroused.
“What’re you going to do about my doors, huh? And about that goddamned dog?”
“Doors?” Clive was baffled. “What doors? What dog?”
“What’re you? Stupid? All that howling.” He turned to face the gathered crowd with a dramatic flourish of his housecoat. “Did you all hear a dog or am I crazy?”
Several heads in the crowd nodded in agreement. Tucker turned back to Clive. “See? I told you there was a dog. Now, when are you gonna catch the guy who hacked down my doors?”
Clive forced himself to refrain from glancing back over his shoulder at the rents and tears in Jeremy Lucas’s body and felt discomfort stirring at the drag queen’s words. He tried to ignore it, and largely succeeded, but he couldn’t ignore the cold sweat forming at the small of his back. Since the vampire attacks, he’d found himself uncomfortably attuned to anything unusual in connection with a dead body, and he still couldn’t solidify the unusual wrongness he felt about the current situation. He shoved down rumbles of mild panic and determinedly focused on Tucker once again.
“Maybe we should start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Would you mind showing me what doors you’re talking about?”
Tucker snorted at the unbelievable ignorance of the captain and, without a word, marched up the front stairs of the building and into the entryway. Clive followed closely behind.
“There!” Tucker said as he threw out his arm, pointing with a gesture that Theda Bara would have envied. “Just look at that!”
Look, Clive did. With a sinking feeling, he examined the gouges in the wood frame of the door that was hanging, battered and broken, supported only by the top hinge.
My God! he thought in horror. Those look like… His mind reeled against the thought that was about to come to the fore.
“No,” he said aloud.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” Clive regained his composure and turned to face the irate property owner. “Obviously, someone’s used an axe or something on this. Did you happen to notice a hatchet or an axe lying around in the stairwell?”
“An axe? In the stairwell?” Tucker’s look was witheringly hostile. “What kind of a ridiculous question is that? Is that the type of question my tax dollars pay for?” he demanded.
Clive blushed slightly. “I meant, is there an axe missing from one of the fire boxes? You know, on the hook next to the hose?”
“This building does not supply axes as part of the tenant amenities,” Tucker said huffily. “I pay taxes to make sure that the fire department brings their own axes, thank you very much!”
“Well, then!” said Clive briskly, pointedly avoiding looking at the ruined door again. “One of my deputies will be along to take your statement in a few minutes.”
“Oh, yeah? And what about the dog?” Tucker was adamant.
“Ms. Tucker,” Clive began, trying his best to keep his voice level. The drag queen’s belligerence was beginning to get on his nerves. “I hardly think the damage to the door is the work of a dog. Do you?”
“Maybe not,” came the grudging reply. He waved his finger in front of the captain’s face in stern admonition. “But if I’m murdered in my bed by some rabid animal, you can bet I’ll make sure the mayor hears about it! And the press!”
“I’m certain you will,” Clive soothed, “so we’ll take great care to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Well, good then. Hey!” His exclamation came as Clive began to walk away from the ruined entrance. “Aren’t you going to take fingerprints off that door?” demanded Tucker.
“No,” said Clive, tersely, “I think we’d better leave that to the forensics people, don’t you?” And so saying, he walked shakily out of the building, leaving an astonished Brooke Tucker staring open-mouthed at his retreating back.
Clive stood by the curb, lost in thought, until the forensics people showed up. Satisfied the investigation would proceed in accordance with standard procedures, he returned to his car. He considered going back to the station but the thought of facing the details of the pet mutilation reports after seeing the condition of Lucas’ body, made him nauseated.
Suddenly, the pet murders seemed to make horrific sense to him. “Impossible!” he breathed.
Childhood memories, once distant and then brought to the fore by his experiences last fall, began to re-emerge from the caverns of his mind into which Clive had quietly been forcing them for the past half year or so. With determination, he pushed them back down again and put his car into gear. There would be time enough for speculation, he told himself, after Becky had finished her grisly work.
CHAPTER 4
Troy spent the entire morning dutifully trudging through the streets of West Hollywood, laboriously copying telephone numbers from FOR LEASE signs. He was not so absorbed in his search, however, that he missed a single opportunity to flash his dazzling smile at every attractive man he passed along the way.
Privately, Troy considered the search to be a complete waste of time; he had already decided which building he and Chris were going to move into. However, so many years living with Chris had given him great familiarity with his lover’s obsessive quirks. Troy knew Chris was incapable of simply taking Troy’s suggestions and moving to where Troy wanted to move. On the contrary, Chris would insist on examining each prospective unit, dragging out the process long after Troy would have been happily settled into their new home, until finally he did what Troy had wanted him to do in the first place. Unbeknownst to Chris, from the first moment Troy had laid eyes on one particular building, nearly nine months before, he had already decided: one day, they would live there.
The Building, as Troy mentally thought of it, was located at the corner of Crescent Heights and Fountain, one block north of the infamous Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a huge brick edifice, covered in ancient ivy and faintly Gothic-looking. Ten-foot-tall casement windows revealed high ceilings with gorgeous crown moldings. By creeping up the stone stairway and sneaking across the flagstone terrace one evening, Troy managed to peek inside a ground floor apartment, and with glee, confirmed his suspicion that the building had hardwood floors. Yes, the second he’d seen The Building, Troy had adored it and fallen in love.
His task now, therefore, was to come up with a list of buildings that were not-too-obviously eminently impractical so Chris could inspect them with great ceremony and rule them out as just another example of Troy’s frivolity. He started out by taking note of those signs that bore the monthly rent, carefully including only those that would cost more than three thousand dollars a month. Then he indulged himself, listing only those buildings he recognized from having been featured in one of his favorite films. He was certain that, even if the apartment proved to be perfectly suited for their needs, he could chatter on about the film it was used in, who starred in it, what the female characters had been wearing and the plot for as long as necessary until Chris threw up his hands in disgust and vetoed the choice.
He followed this up with apartments that had once been the homes of movie stars who he particularly admired. Ray Milland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Katherine Hepburn had all, at one time or another, lived in West Hollywood. It was at this point that his plan almost backfired. The Hepburn apartment, a charming two bedroom ranch-style building just off Fountain Avenue, proved almost irresistibly tempting. But Troy managed to steel himself against it, determined to live in The Building no matter what he had to give up to assure it.
By adding some buildings that he knew Chris would consider tacky or ugly, by making sure to list those with managers who had recently arrived in town from Europe and would likely be suspicious of Chris’ habits, and by carefully scheduling viewing appointments so they would have to drive past The Building at least three or four times a night, Troy was certain he’d eventually get his wish. What’s more, he was fairly certain he’d arranged things cleverly enough for Chris to choose The Building on what he thought was his own initiative.
That evening, after Chris had gone through the list and crossed out the most obvious examples of Troy’s flightiness, they’d piled into Chris’ white Volkswagen Cabriolet and started their drive-by tour of available living spaces. Troy watched, amused, at the quick, inquisitive glance Chris gave The Building on their first pass on the way to one of Marilyn Monroe’s old apartments. Driving past it once again to the building constructed on the site of Ray Milland’s old estate, Chris’ look had changed to one of outright curiosity tempered by mild interest.
An hour later, after having seen a total of eight apartments, they were on their way to examine the Katherine Hepburn building. This time, when they passed The Building, Troy noted with contentment that Chris’ eyes lingered admiringly for several important seconds. On their last pass of the evening, driving toward the Enclave where Dick Powell had once lived, Troy could tell Chris’ curiosity and admiration were fully aroused.
In fact, once they’d reached the Enclave, Chris casually ran his finger down Troy’s prepared list of prospective apartments until he came to the buildings that were in the vicinity of The Building. Chris paused for a moment, his finger resting on the line — from which The Building’s address was conspicuously absent — his brow slightly furrowed. The silence dragged on for a moment until, with a shake of his head, Chris got out of the car to see if he could get a better look at the interior of an apartment through someone’s open drapes.
Satisfied his plan was working perfectly, Troy settled back into his seat to patiently await the birth of the idea he’d subtly planted in Chris’ mind.
Clive said nothing to Becky about his disconcerting suspicions, merely telling her an accident victim had been taken to the morgue under Ty’s supervision the previous evening. In the back of his mind, he wondered if she would start jumping to similar conclusions but suspected she would not. Becky had been raised, he knew, in Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia; he doubted she would share the common experience of things he had witnessed in the Louisiana bayous and swamps of his youth.
He prayed desperately that her autopsy of Jeremy Lucas would report nothing other than the young man’s ordinary suicide and a garden variety traffic accident. Clive felt guilty at not providing her with the police reports, even though he had sometimes omitted to do so in the past. But his thoughts were running toward such crazy ideas that he rationalized his omission with the thought that if there were anything unusual to discover, Becky would be certain to find it.
He breathed a sigh of relief when his secretary dropped Becky’s report onto his desk. If anything odd had cropped up, the coroner would have delivered the report herself. He opened it, and all his wild suspicions vanished; quite clearly Jeremy Lucas’s corpse had been the victim of a bizarre, but rationally explained, accident — mad dog notwithstanding.
Nevertheless, just in case, Clive picked up the telephone to call the duty sergeant. He intended to have extra deputies, fully armed, patrolling West Hollywood’s streets during the coming evening. Then, if nothing untoward happened, he could relax, pigeon-holing his wild fancies as a mere residual effect of childhood neurosis.
He hoped against hope that tonight would prove corpse-free. Pamela Burman was due back from vacation the following morning; she was sure to have a shit fit at the yearly violent death statistics that had climbed substantially during her two week absence. The thought of Burman’s reaction alone gave him heartburn. But if the deaths continued, she’d be livid. If the deaths continued, he’d have to have a heart-to-heart talk with Becky. If the deaths continued…but Clive preferred not to think about that!
Chris awakened to Barbra Streisand singing about twinkling lights and tinkling ice. I have to remember, he chastised himself as he raised the coffin lid, to pack up the rest of those damned films as soon as possible.
He rose grumpily from his casket and marched into the bathroom. During the past few days, he’d been unable to shake a feeling of dissatisfied nostalgia pervading his waking hours. He felt bad about being snippy with Troy, but he couldn’t help himself; sometimes the little monster just didn’t know when his usually endearing, ditzy mental processes, puppy dog charm and constant mindless chatter became irritating.
Oh well, he thought with a wry grin, probably someone I ate.
He turned on the shower, running the hot water at a temperature that would have scalded a mortal human being and left the door open so the bathroom wouldn’t fog up. Then he skinned out of his Scooby Doo boxer shorts — another of Troy’s gifts — to stand naked in front of the mirror. As he did every evening, he examined his face and body critically. First he leaned forward so his nose was almost pressed up against the glass and stuck out his tongue. Of course his reflection was nonexistent, but he’d discovered, if he breathed heavily onto the glass and sniffed the accumulated moisture, he could determine the severity of his “evening breath.” It was ironic, he thought, that even though his dietary requirements were quite different from what they had been when he’d been alive, he was unable to dispense with the necessity of brushing his teeth. Stale blood, after several hours, produced an odor that, although Chris had to go to great lengths to notice it, Troy couldn’t stand.
When I was young, he mused, I don’t recall having toothbrushes. He squeezed some toothpaste onto his brush and prepared to grimace at the taste. Humans associated the flavor of mint with freshness and cleanliness. Chris couldn’t understand it. He found it repulsive and was always careful to rinse repeatedly with clear water after brushing to remove all vestiges of the taste from his mouth. He’d tried so-called “flavorless” tooth powders and pastes over the years, but most contained peroxide, which reacted with the bits of blood in his mouth and foamed alarmingly, making him resemble a rabid dog. Baking soda was even worse, leaving his mouth dry almost to desiccation; salt, which he’d tried to use back in the early Nineteenth Century, had given him violent headaches.
Chris had been the third child of eight, born just outside of Boston. His father, Joshua Driscoll, was a wealthy banker, fiercely supportive of American independence from the British monarchy. His mother, Martha, was a plump, affectionate woman, intensely religious, whose lack of even the most rudimentary education caused her to seem rather dull when compared to her husband. But Joshua died in 1774, and Martha was left to care for Chris’ younger siblings alone. It wasn’t until Chris met Troy and he began raising a child of his own, so to speak, that he truly appreciated how difficult his mother’s task must have been.
